It's time for finals which means 2011-12 is a wrap. It was a stellar year and after several thousand hours in the classroom, I've hit the groove where I'm not worrying about the material or procedures and focusing on making the lessons a higher quality. Summer goals:

Reorganize Algebra II, upcoming STAAR test has different priorities

Organize Pre Cal material into topics

Upload my curriculum to this site

Brainstorm some iPad in the classroom items that aren't hokey

Try building an iPad based resource pack

Identify lessons that were weak

Learn Mathematica

Overall here's a good thing/bad thing list for the year.

Good Things:

Groups were great, can I get the Algebra II kids to invest in them more?

Notebooks were great, need to hold the few kids that don't do them more accountable

Posters were great, do I keep the same topics or fiddle with it a bit?

Sidewalk Chalk was brilliant, should I do that more than once?

Having a web cam for document viewing was novel, can we do more with that?

Found lots of ways to up the writing components of my test questions/activities

Asked their opinion on things many times in the first semester, got interesting responses

Forced myself to take days off during the week

Lesson planning was 100 times more organized

LaTeX can be bent to the needs of K-12 education

Bad Things:

My pencil supply vanished second semester, first semester I was far better about enforcing their return

Still helping some of the strugglers too much, losing track of the strugglers in my large classes

Pre Cal instructional videos were planned well, but not implemented like I wanted, need a stronger set of guidelines for this project

Algebra II kids really shouldn't be so dependent on calculators

Taught a lot of lessons that weren't given greater context, it was math for math's sake

Some of my tested topics were way too stupid easy

I can be derailed and will keep it going far longer than I probably should

Kids never really came to the board, but given all the other interaction I used, is that a bad thing? Don't know.

More will come to me as I give the year time to digest. I didn't work myself to death and I'm slated to teach the same classes next year, so hopefully we're out of the time intense creation phase and into the more interesting iteration phase. In order to earn their exemptions, I made Pre-Cal seniors write essays about their relationship with math, compliment of the year: